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Oct 20, 2018

How to Block Banners in Windows 10 Version 1809 Settings App

One of the changes coming to users with Windows 10 version 1809, also
known as October 2018 Update, is a refined experience in the Settings
app, as Microsoft wants to make setting up a PC a more straightforward
process.
Called “Suggested Content,” the new feature basically comes down to huge
banners that are displayed right within the Settings app, technically
providing recommendations on how to enable or configure certain
features.

For many users, this is a welcome improvement, especially because they
can thus discover things they didn’t know they existed in Windows 10,
but for others, and I’m talking about power users here, seeing those
banners every time they launch Settings isn’t exactly their preferred
cup of tea.

First off, some clarification. There are people out there who describe
this new feature as “ads.” These aren’t ads, but only banners that show
up within the Settings app to point you to new features that have been
added to Windows 10 lately. They won’t launch the browser or anything
like that, but keep you within Settings and help you configure certain
features.

And what’s more, you can actually disable them, though I must admit that
locating the option isn’t necessarily the most straightforward thing to
do, especially for those new to Windows 10.

Previously, options like these were included in the Personalization
section within Settings, the same place where users can block
suggestions from showing up in Start. For example, those
recommendations, which are a lot closer to the concept of ads than these
banners in Settings, can be blocked from the following path:

Just click the toggle to disable it and the banners no longer show up in the Settings app.

Disabling Suggested Content in Settings

There’s also another way to block the content in Settings and you’re
going to need to use the Registry Editor for this. Just type regedit in
the Start menu and launch the app. Navigate to the following path in the
Registry Editor:

Other items with similar names may also be stored at the same location,
so make sure you don’t modify them. Once you create these three
different registry entries, you need to change their value to allow or
block banners in the Settings app.

In order to block Suggested Content, the value of each of the three
entries must be set to 0. To enable Suggested Content you can either
delete the entries or just input value 1 for each of them.

Windows 10 version 1809 (October 2018 Update) further improves the
Settings app, so you might want to leave this feature enabled to find
out what’s new. Microsoft has made it a priority to discontinue the
traditional Control Panel and move all configuration options to
Settings, so sooner or later, this will become the one destination for
everything on Windows 10.

And with new features being added to the operating system, Suggested
Content may be a good way to make people aware of updates to Windows 10.

In the meantime, Windows 10 October 2018 Update is still on hold after
the company pulled the plug on the rollout due to a bug leading to data
loss. A fix has already been developed, but there’s no info as to when
the release could resume.